There are plenty of highly-useful resources and web apps that have been created with freelance designers and developers in mind. But for many freelancers, especially those who are just getting started, pricing can be an issue. In this post we’ll feature 29 resources that are not only very useful fore freelancers, but also extremely affordable. Many of them are free or offer a free plan, and the others are priced below the competition.

Hopefully you will find some resources here that will help you to save time and make your work more efficient and effective. If you have suggestions of other resources aside from those that are listed here, please leave a comment.

CurdBee is an online app for managing invoices. The free account allows you to manage unlimited clients and invoices, and you can accept payment through PayPal or Google Checkout. The premium account ($5 per month) offers additional features like custom branding and overdue email reminders.

SlimTimer is a simple and free resource for tracking your time. You can create tasks, start and stop the timer whenever needed, and run reports. You can also share tasks so that you can see reports on your co-workers or anyone who reports to you.

Vyew allows you to host conferencing and collaborations for free. You can meet with clients or coworkers with the free account, or upgrade to a premium plan to remove ads and get some additional features.

Jumpchart is a free resource for website planning and wireframing. With the free account you can manage one project of up to 10 pages, or you can upgrade to a premium plan starting at just $5 per month.

Billing Boss is a free online invoicing app. You can send an unlimited number of invoices with the free account, and there is an option to upgrade to a Payment Plus plan to accept payments to your merchant account online for $5 per month.

Fanurio is time tracking and invoicing software for freelancers. As opposed to web-based apps that charge a monthly fee, with Fanurio you can manage unlimited clients, projects and invoices for a one-time cost of $59.

Subernova offers online project management and invoicing for a low monthly fee of $5.99. It features a sleek interface and all the features you need to stay on top of your projects and outstanding invoices.

Harvest is a web app for tracking time, expenses and invoices. The Solo plan starts at $12 per month and allows for unlimited clients, projects and invoices, which may be a cheaper option than most web-based invoicing solutions for freelancers that send out a lot of invoices.

Glasscubes is a resource for sharing, communicating and collaborating. You can share files, manage your projects, manage your contacts, and more. The free account allows up to 3 users, 100 contacts, and 100MB of storage.

Browsershots is a highly-useful free service that provides screenshots of a page in a wide variety of browsers. Choose the browser, operating system, and even the screen resolution to test your designs.

About Steven Snell

I would highly recommend Invoice Machine (www.invoicemachine.com) for invoicing. It’s free for all the features up to 3 invoices per month, and a small monthly fee for more… and if you need more than 3 invoices in a month you can probably afford the plan.

As for wireframing and site planning, Mockingbird (www.gomockingbird.com) is wonderful. It’s built with the Cappuccino framework, so it’s a JavaScript-based web app. You can lay out pages, link them together, and save and share your mockups.

I’ve also used http://www.freshbooks.com They have awesome customer service and the online tool is very simple to use. It’s free if you only need to use it a couple times a month. And the plans go up from there.

Michael, I’ve used FreshBooks too and it’s definitely a good service, but I didn’t include it in the post because I think there are lower-priced options that are sufficient. That’s not to say that it’s not worth the money, but since the post was focused on free and low-priced resources I didn’t include it. The free plan isn’t bad but it’s more limited than some of the other options from the post, in my opinion.

there is a free open source program called opengoo, that works on your local machine or on a remote website, which can help you do.

1. Project management 2. team collaboration, with security privileges. 3. To do list for each project. 4. Contact list – arranged by company and representative. 5. Tracking the time spent on the project / Budget spent. 6. Has an integrated calendar, reminder. 7. Has the capability of producing reports. 8. Has an integrated e-mail, send and receive through the interface etc.

I’m sure I’m forgetting more of the options, it’s free, I use it every day in it helps me organize clients and projects. Has most of the features those other programs mentioned here have in one program.

Nice list! I second Freshbooks. There are other options, but I love FB.

Not to overlook the obvious, but what about Google’s office suite, Wave, and Google Voice? Great tools for collaboration and sharing documents and notes within an office environment. And not having to pay $$$$ for Microsoft Office is definitely good budgeting!

Thanks for the list. some very useful resources there that I had never come across before.

I can highly recommend Skype though as I use it almost every day for calling all of my clients and even instant messaging them when I am multitasking on something else. All without having to pay a penny!

Thanks for the great review – our model for Billing Boss is to keep it free to send unlimited invoices to unlimited customers. Where it really comes in as a benefit is our new feature called Payment Plus which allows a small business to use their existing ‘card not present’ merchant account to get paid on Billing Boss. Unlike other free online invoicing tools – we don’t require you to sign up with a required merchant account provider in order to get paid. Payment Plus currently supports Moneris, E-xact, BeanStream, Cybersource and Authorize.net – some of the major players in Canada and in the US. You can find out more by visiting http://www.billingboss.com oh – did i forget to mention – Payment Plus is only $5 a month – no contract, cancel anytime.

I use Outright for tracking income, expenses, they also help you to estimate your taxes. For invoicing, Curdbee and Dropbox for storage/sharing. These are the free tools I would highly recommend and glad to see them in your list.

You can also try Inquiry Wizard. Inquiry Wizard is an free online inquiry tracking application as well as a small customer relationship management software that helps freelancers keep track of the inquiries they have received. In addition, it allows to determine when these inquiries lead to actual projects, and lets them view which customer contact medium (e-mail, phone, etc.) brings in the most inquiries. For more infos see the faq page on http://www.inquirywizard.net/

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Great stuff! I used Remember the Milk for a long time until Google Apps finally upgraded their tasks – now I prefer Google Apps as an integrated tool for Email, Tasks & Calendar. I guess GA is probably too obvious & universally accepted to make the list.

I would also like to recommend OroTimesheet for time tracking and invoicing. It is really easy to use and very affordable. It helps me keep track of the time I spend on each project. I can easily create an invoice from my timesheets. I used many time tracking software over the years and OroTimesheet is my favorite one.